Genesis 20:12

Summary

Genesis 20:12 records Abraham's explanation to Abimelech that Sarah is genuinely his half-sister — sharing the same father but not the same mother — and that she subsequently became his wife. The verse combines a genealogical clarification with a statement of marital status.

Key words

• 'a.me.Nah ("truly", H0546) — an adverb reinforcing the veracity of the claim, intensified by the preceding gam ("also", H1571), producing an emphatic "and indeed truly."
• 'a.cho.T ("[is] sister", H0269) — a feminine singular noun in construct form followed by the suffix -i ("my", H9020), literally "sister-of-me."
• vat- ("[the] daughter of", H1323G) — appears twice (lines 6 and 12), each time in construct state, linking to 'a.V ("father", H0001G) and 'i.M ("mother", H0517) respectively, both also carrying the "my" suffix.
• hi' ("she", H1931) — an independent personal pronoun placed after the predicate, giving structural weight to the identification "she is."
• te.hi- ("she became", H1961) — the verb hayah ("to be/become") in narrative form (vav-consecutive), marking the shift from describing her identity to narrating a subsequent event (becoming a wife).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence divides into two parts joined by the narrative vav on te.hi-. The first part is a nominal (verbless) clause: 'a.cho.T-i ("my sister") + vat-'a.V-i ("daughter of my father") + hi' ("she"), meaning the predicate nouns are stated and then confirmed by the pronoun hi', a common Hebrew construction for emphasis on identity. This is followed by a contrastive clause introduced by 'akh ("only", H0389) and negated by lo' ("not", H3808): lo' vat-'i.M-i ("not daughter of my mother"), which restricts the sibling relationship specifically to the paternal line.

The second half shifts grammatically: va-te.hi-li le-'i.shah uses the narrative vav construction on the verb hayah, signaling sequential narrative action — "and she became to me for a wife." The preposition le- before 'i.shah ("wife", H0802H) marks the resulting status, a common Hebrew idiom for entering a marital role (literally "became to me into a wife").

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'akh lo' ("only not") as all' ouk ("but not"), a simpler contrastive conjunction rather than reproducing the Hebrew's two-part adverb-plus-negation structure. The Vulgate's duxi eam in uxorem ("I took her in marriage") shifts the grammatical subject to "I" (Abraham as active agent), whereas the Hebrew va-te.hi-li keeps Sarah as the grammatical subject who "became" his wife, a more passive/resultative framing that the Vulgate's active verb duxi does not preserve.